THE TWO JAKES
Sure, there’s the affable, charming young actor whose name crops up every now and then in the gossip pages. And then there’s this other guy, the one who’s a little… darker. He’s much more interestingBy Marshall Sella; Photographs by Nathaniel GoldbergHere’s a fine reason that the perfectly azure rooftop swimming pool of the Peninsula hotel in Beverly Hills is all but abandoned at midday. All this week, TV news promos have been scaring the locals about the “severe cold snap” here—in the wee hours, the temperatures have actually been plummeting into the 50s. Thankfully, the mercury today has rallied all the way up to the sixty-five-degree mark. But even so, only two brave souls, a sleek twentysomething woman and her peevish, leathery mother, have taken the Shackleton-like voyage to lounge in one of the poolside cabanas.
Jake Gyllenhaal arrives wearing the sort of clothes he always seems to be wearing: comfy, but stylish-comfy. There’s a plush gray Ralph Lauren sweater, cool jeans, and high-top Converse All Stars that are so pristinely white that they might have been purchased moments ago in the lobby of this hotel. Peeking from beneath the sweater is a necklace—a gold chain with sapphires from Madagascar—that his sister gave him for his birthday. Gyllenhaal is meticulously unshaven; his coif is movie-star unkempt, every hair perfectly out of place.
This first meeting has been a little complicated. As things have fallen, I’ve been shown an edit of Gyllenhaal’s new film, Zodiac (to be released on March 2)—then, partly due to my own poor sense of direction, I have had just enough time to drive at excessive speeds to this hotel, nearly killing at least three people in the process. Gyllenhaal, true to what appears to be his unlimited reserve of politeness, actually apologizes to me for my own insanity. “I understand you just got out of the film,” he says, sympathetically shaking his head. “I am so sorry. You must be completely Zodiacked.” That term is not far off. The film’s director, David Fincher, has paced the thing in such a way that it slingshots you out the door after the climax. Careening around in a rental car is not an appropriate way to mull it over.
To date, the public at large hasn’t quite found a clever label to hang around Gyllenhaal’s neck, the simple descriptive phrase that might help us associate with his “real personality.” The way, for instance, one might recognize Paul Newman as a laconic humanitarian, or how William Hurt has often been labeled as insane and verbose. “I like all those!” Gyllenhaal says, laughing. “Being known as an insane, verbose humanitarian would be fine with me. Though you’re talking about people who are twice and three times my age there, with all that experience. I like that the articles about me lack those labels, but it might be increasingly appropriate to define myself—who I am, what I want to do. But I’m still trying to find what that is.”
That Gyllenhaal has evaded the tags comes as little surprise; he never seems to swerve into the classic self-absorption that Hollywood folk are apparently trained in. Part of his affability seems to come from an odd paradox—that he comes off as gentle without being the least bit milquetoast. This is precisely what critics found so winning in Brokeback Mountain: gravity disguised as a lightness of manner, the steel-in-silk effect.
Gyllenhaal’s public image has come across in somewhat superficial form—with few exceptions—as a series of “Meet Jake Gyllenhaal” profiles in magazines, decorated and sometimes dominated by the fact that his father, Stephen Gyllenhaal, is a film director (Losing Isaiah); his mother, Naomi Foner, is a screenwriter (Running on Empty); and of course, his sister is the equally intriguing Maggie Gyllenhaal, who, among her body of work, costarred with Jake in the genuinely disturbing Donnie Darko.
Gyllenhaal shrugs it all off. “Look, everybody is inextricably tied to his or her family,” he says. “And it makes sense somehow that I’d find my way into this business through them. But this business doesn’t make any sense!”
*****
Zodiac is a curious choice for a suspense film. The Zodiac killings were never absolutely solved, so the viewer must suspend not only disbelief but also any hope that the movie will offer true closure. Rather incredibly, Fincher achieves precisely this aim, with help from Gyllenhaal and his costars Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo. “The most interesting movies,” says Gyllenhaal, “are those when, even though you know the outcome, you still fully believe there’ll be another outcome.”
His performance is one of his sliest yet. At first he carries himself as an almost ineffectual figure—a rather meek former Eagle Scout cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle who takes a fierce interest in the Zodiac revelations, but also a man who seems destined not to be a force in much of anything, least of all a serial-killer story. In the role, Gyllenhaal proves his knack for being nondescript in an immensely engaging way; he masters what Cold War spies used to describe as the hardest part of their job when doing surveillance, the impossible art of doing nothing. But as the movie speeds along, almost imperceptibly, a terrible weight comes down on him. Let’s just say that, by film’s end, the onetime Eagle Scout has lost the spring from his step.
The Zodiac Killer may not have racked up such a massive body count—even if you assume all the killings attributed to him were his in the first place—but two other factors ensconced him in the national imagination: the fact that he sent elaborate coded messages to taunt the police, and the fact that, technically, he may still walk the streets. As the protagonist, Gyllenhaal’s character is the stand-in for our own national obsession. “Those codes just needed a resolution,” he says. “You think, ‘There’s got to be a reason’—but maybe the killer didn’t even know the reason.”
It’s a central paradox in Gyllenhaal’s career that despite his unmistakable features, he manages to be a bit of a chameleon. Not in some Olivier—or even a Gary Oldman—sense. His face doesn’t allow him to actually disappear into his characters. But within a year and a half, he moved from the sinewy physicality of Brokeback Mountain to the sheer brawn of Jarhead and back to this lanky cartoonist of Zodiac. “It’s hard,” he says. “It’s a weird deterioration.”
“Deterioration?” I can’t help but say. “Yeah. You’ve really fallen apart.”
“It’s a deterioration in terms of that character,” he explains. “As you work, there’s something nice about having to exercise every day and have your mind in a different place. When you’re not doing that, you have to deal with other feelings.”
Undeniably, Gyllenhaal is an absurdly healthy guy. He has an athlete’s natural grace and stillness. He is a morning person. His average day, when he gets one, starts with almost three hours of biking or an hour of running (on average, he runs a mile in just over six minutes). He’s a pal of Lance Armstrong; naturally, since the two know each other, the press has run with all manner of gossip about their friendship, from the talk that Jake will be playing Lance in a film (though the two don’t remotely resemble each other) to the one that, while they ride together, they also ride together, if you know what I mean.
“That is quite a rumor,” Jake says. “Yeah, people who are semi-well-known can’t seem to hang out without the story being that (a) one is playing the other in a movie, or (b) they’re having an affair.”
All this may account for the fact that he’s uncooperative fodder for the tabloid thrashers; he just doesn’t fixate on the nightlife. And what “Page Six” reporter ever got on a bike?
“The only way I can say it is that I do what I like to do—and I like to do it usually when the sun is out. I love being outside.”
“Doing what, besides biking?” I ask.
“Besides biking,” he exhales, “I love cooking. Going to places like the farmers market. And sometimes what I actually love to do is go to a farm and get fresh milk or watch a pig get slaughtered. A friend of mine raised a pig this summer, and they slaughtered it.”
*****
Sketches of Hollywood actors are not complete without bite-size nuggets of information, so please enjoy a few factoids about Jacob Benjamin Gyllenhaal. He is not dating anyone right now. He doesn’t spend much time watching television, but he has seen a few episodes of The West Wing and has them all on TiVo (and he also occasionally took in Arrested Development and My So-Called Life). Asked what his house is like, he insists on replying, “It is a world of icebergs,” so do with that what you will. Working years ago as a lifeguard, he once was compelled to aid someone who’d been stung by a jellyfish by, yes, pissing on the victim. He learned to play chess on the set of Jarhead and describes both Jamie Foxx and Peter Sarsgaard as “phenomenal.” (Though, he adds, Foxx routinely beat Sarsgaard, which Sarsgaard did not appreciate.) And when pressed to sum up his life until now, he makes the bold claim that he was “a boy who always wanted to be a professional basketball player and ended up in a sad Hollywood career.” After trying that depiction out for fun, he juts out his chin and adds, “I’m 26 years old. That’s hard to answer. Know why?” Then he leans in and goes deadly serious. “Because I’m a big thinker! I’ll get back to you in ten years—with a book!”
As agile as he is in conversation, Gyllenhaal is also surprisingly nuanced between the lines, a skill most actors develop later in their careers. The real emotion in Brokeback Mountain poured out in the long, desperate pauses, not in the dialogue. So I run a rough theory past him—that maybe he is practicing a kind of transmogrified Harold Pinter, whose meanings always hide between the words. Jake bursts into laughter. “Yes, I’m the perfect guy to act Pinter in the ellipses!” he cries. “The words, I’m not so good at. But the ellipses—”here, he pauses to really attack the next phrase—“I would destroy!”
Turns out Gyllenhaal isn’t faking it when he discusses Pinter, or David Mamet, or Tom Stoppard. Like so many movie actors (many of whom, granted, just mouth the words to retain their credibility), he wants to keep a lifeline to his stage work. “Film acting is harder for me than stage work, in a way,” he says. “I’m much more of an endurance athlete than I am a sprinter—and movies are all about the sprint. I love the marathon aspect of a play.”
Reflexively, I ask if he ever wants to try Shakespeare. “I was gonna say that the closest I’ve come to that was David Fincher,” he says. “It was all about the discipline and the structure. And he is a disciplinarian in terms of how he sees a film.”
It’s a truism that different directors employ different techniques to catch the right moments—the best sprints—from their actors. Where David Fincher offered structure, the director of Brokeback Mountain went another way. “Ang Lee, doing Brokeback, would just say things like ‘sadder’ or ‘happier,’ ” Jake recalls. “Though I don’t think he deals that way with emotions. He was using that to communicate very simply, to get from us what we were feeling at that moment. A lot of actors force themselves, believing ‘If the writer says something, I should be feeling it.’ But if the words are good enough, they will take you there.”
Robert Downey Jr. has similar recollections of Fincher. Though Downey Jr.’s schedule was not as demanding as Gyllenhaal’s, he seems to share Jake’s admiration for Fincher’s ability to elicit emotional turmoil. “That film was such a crucible,” Downey Jr. says. “It really stirred up a bunch of shit, in everybody. It’s a bit like doing a film with Oliver Stone. Five years later, you’re still digging into it. It’s a trial.”
One thing Downey Jr. comes back to repeatedly when he speaks of Gyllenhaal is how tough Jake is. “You could say he’s too sensitive for this industry,” Downey Jr. says. “That’s not even the right word. He’s clear. But he’s also a total badass. He and Steve McQueen would have gotten along amazingly. Guys who will do anything, anywhere. A lot of people think actors are pussies. That isn’t the case. He’s nice, all right, but he’s also wet, dark, and wild.”
That combination of adjectives isn’t out of keeping when one describes an actor, but they also edge toward another Hollywood personality type—that of the director. Given Gyllenhaal’s upbringing, I can’t resist asking him the hackneyed question: Doesn’t he someday want to direct?
Whether it’s a result of living in Hollywood or not, Jake has perfect pitch when it comes to questions like this; he’s attentive enough to know where you’re headed, and sharp enough, usually, to have answered the question in his own head long in advance. “I do, as you mentioned earlier, like to aid in a director’s vision,” he says. “I also like the abrasion that comes about when our visions collide. But I always ache to collaborate—because that’s how my family has always worked.
“As green as I am in the movie business,” he goes on, “I am fluent in the language of film. Like someone who, say, grows up in France and speaks French, I understand it. Maybe I can’t yet write a novel in French, can’t yet make my own movie, but my life has given me a step up. This is a language I grew up with.”
He is not exaggerating. From a very young age, Jake was looking at scripts, watching his parents work, and he came to understand “how it all moved.”
“My mom would write a scene and ask me, ‘Is this how a kid would talk?’ ” he recalls. “It was really fucking cool. Things like sitting in on rehearsals with River Phoenix and Martha Plimpton when I was that age—that was cool. I guess I was first exposed to the process when I was, what, 8?”
The waiter arrives at our cabana and wants to steal away with Jake’s plate, but he’s not giving that up. Gyllenhaals don’t take food lightly, and even that primal urge is inextricably tangled up with the family business. “I always knew my mom was writing something when there’d be ten banana breads around and tons of baked goods,” Jake says. “Everything in the house would be clean and fixed, and I’d think, ‘Oh, Mom’s writing!’ When writers write, they do everything but write. Everything else gets done… Though she does make a great banana bread.”
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